Making the Stinging Nettles Preparation

some additional suggestions and hands on advice

Everyone should consider making the stinging nettle preparation this spring. Nettles are abundant and tender in the springtime and it is one of the only biodynamic preparations that does not require an animal-derived membrane as a sheath. In a way, unlike the various floral preparations, nettles has incorporated more of animal life into its entire being. Of all the preparations, stinging nettles require the least investment of time and makes some of the very best compost — so there’s no excuse not to make at least a little of it. While nettles is often associated with Michaelmas — the time when bramble leaves turn a burnt red, by legend from Lucifer being cast out of heaven — we should remember that there is a polar relationship between spring and autumn, between dawn and sunset between earth and sky. What emerges in springtime is what entered in autumn. There are few more penitential herbs to harvest during April, the “cruelest month.”¹ Look around: in April everything is beautiful and green and in flower, but so little is really edible. The larder grows empty and the grass useless for human food. You can’t eat the lambs — they’re far too small. And you can’t take their milk — they aren’t weaned yet. And the cows often don’t give birth until May. And you can’t rob the chicken’s eggs — she hasn’t hatched out a clutch yet. In many cases the ground itself is too cold to work. Driving this week, I saw a serendipitous sign that said: “No fishing February - April.” Even the fish deserve a break. If we don’t provide a window for wildness and for life to reproduce, we humans have a tendency to devour it all. In a time of extraordinary abundance, we can forget that the festival seasons correspond to deep agricultural time. Dietary restrictions around lent correspond to the fact that every year, this is a natural time of deprivation. If we consumed too much in winter, when we felt desperate. But in the midst of a time of hunger, nettles emerges from the earth with its burning quality that protects a nourishing proteinaceous food.

Making Nettle Soup

When making stinging nettles as a preparation, you could almost say we catch something of the Michaelic impulse as it rises during Lent. What gathers in and rays out its iron influence in spring is the same force that rays in as meteoric iron and is gathered up into an inward spear — not against external adversaries but against the dragon within. When we compost something, as when making a pepper, it becomes its opposite. The outward prickliness of nettles becomes an inner pointedness, turned against the astringent serpentine quality that would keep everything bound up in the hard and dense (Ahrimanic) root. What the root takes to itself — and it must take — must be overcome by the leaf. What the dragon hoards for itself — and it must hoard — must be taken away from it. The world is better for having a serpent in it, but it must be kept underfoot.

St. Michael the Archangel, an important figure in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity alike, with parallel depictions in other traditions.

I prefer only to use medicinal quality herbs for making biodynamic preparations. If it’s not good enough to make tea for human consumption, I prefer to pass on it. If we take Hippocrates seriously, that food should be our medicine and medicine our food, then shouldn’t we offer the best and most diverse diet to our compost piles? Imagine the compost pile as an honored guest: you give the compost pile your first fruits and yourself eat the seconds. We are often entertaining angels unawares.

Another reason to pick early growth is that stinging nettles, once it has flowered, produces a compound known to exacerbate kidney stones. For human consumption, it is perfectly healthy before flowering. The ideal moment is just before flowering. “The whole plant at the time when it is flowering—only not the root.”² I now try to pick only fresh, young growth for making preparations. Nettles are often flowering surprisingly early. If the farm is a living organism, and the human being is its ideal model, shouldn’t we offer only the very best medicinal herbs to our compost? I’ve often made nettle preparation in the autumn (as images below can attest), but I have an affinity for its special value in spring. Springtime is when we make nettle soup because the nettles are at their most tender and nourishing, shouldn’t we also apply the same logic to our nettle preparation?

What is so special about stinging nettles? It contains all essential amino acids — all necessary for the unfolding of life — as well as an abundance of major and minor nutrients. Of all the biodynamic preparations stinging nettles consistently improves the flavor, aroma, and color of vegetables in the garden.

“Take any stinging nettles you can get, let them fade a little, press them together slightly… You simply bury the stuff in the earth. Add a slight layer of peat-moss or the like, so as to protect it from direct contact with the soil. Bury it straight in the earth, but take good note of the place, so that when you afterwards dig it out again you will not be digging out mere soil. There let it spend the winter and the following summer—it must be buried for a whole year.”³

While I am generally in favor of using the freshest herbs possible, you rarely have all the herbs and the sheaths available simultaneously, so one or the other must usually be dried. The ideal should remain a perpetual inspiration (and a rebuke!) but it should never stop us from doing the best we can with what we have now. As Steiner says, “you can use the dried herb just as well.”⁴ In the case of nettles, they reduce in volume so dramatically that there is no way around letting the nettles “fade a little” (wilt) before burying them.

While it is a nice idea to bury nettles without any protection, practical limitations of particular climates and soils require a bit more effort. Devon Strong used bison pericardium as a sheath. While not strictly “necessary” for the preparation itself, I find some of the best insights into the meaning of each preparation are found by individuals who develop a special love for one particular preparation. Earthworms love to consume the buried nettle preparation, so I go out of my way to make a thick barrier formed of peat moss to absorb the “scent” of the decomposing nettles. It is important to remember that Maye Bruce found that some 80% of the effectiveness of biodynamics is from only two of the preparation herbs: yarrow and nettles. Think about that a moment. Assuming all the other preparations are perfect, if nettles and yarrow are mediocre, that limits the total effectiveness of biodynamics to 60%. If any of the other preparations are less than perfect in addition to that shortfall, biodynamics is often really operating at 50% of what it could be. If there were two preparations to get perfectly correct, it is yarrow — and nettles. Tragically, some of the worst chromas I’ve ever seen are often of yarrow preparation. But this deserves its own piece. There are notable exceptions to poor quality yarrow preparation: Garett Long’s birch bark yarrow preparation is one of the best chromas I’ve seen. We should all strive individually to set an even higher standard for the future.

I pack the nettles in unglazed terracotta pots. If there is a hole in the bottom, I plug it with a cork. I find a suitable lid so water will not flood the container and bury this in a fertile spot in the garden where it will rest in the ground for a full year.

According to Alex Podolinsky’s account of it, when he visited with Ehrenfried Pfeiffer in Europe, Pfeiffer was astonished that Podolinsky’s preparation was, in fact, superior. Podolinsky went to extra effort to preserve the nettle preparation from worms by packing it tightly in a clay flue tile with a wooden plug on the end. Between the wooden plug and the nettles is a barrier of peat moss. These are then surrounded by more peat moss. A worm or two may still find their way in, but far fewer than when left exposed. In my experience, fiberglass screen is not enough of a barrier, so I rely entirely on unglazed clay vessels. I have used the unglazed clay vessel method for the nettle preparation with much more consistent success than pillows of nettles wrapped in fiberglass mesh. The fiberglass mesh pillows certainly make for very happy earthworms, which, given enough time, would certainly only benefit the entire farm — but we usually need the nettle preparation for specific uses.

Image Source: Applied Biodynamics, Fall 1998

Image Source: Applied Biodynamics, Fall 1998

Image Source: Applied Biodynamics, Fall 1998

As with anything living, your own way of participation must synthesize your own real-world conditions and the ideal of preserving nettles for twelve months within the womb of the earth. What you do should initially be precisely what you were taught, which should be repeated faithfully for years — until, invariably, you begin to see something that isn’t quite working for your specific context. Over time and with experience, every preparation should have something of your personality in it. At first, fidelity to the process and then adaptation. As Alan Chadwick suggests, it’s all about technique, technique, technique until the technique becomes invisible. Eventually something can become second nature and you’ll appear like you’re not working to an outsider. We’ve had numerous interns pass through the farm who mistakenly believe they know how to farm after one season because things seem to work so smoothly. Of course, we can’t perceive what we lack a concept for — so we are blind not just to what we can’t see, but we don’t even know what we don’t know! A key principle Steiner shares is that we must always presume that we do not know enough and that there is always more to learn. There is a restlessness that comes with deep knowing, because you begin to realize that no matter how deep you dig, you’ll never know it all — and you’ll never by your own efforts reach the center of the earth.⁵ I read voraciously not because I already know enough, but precisely because I am intimately aware of how little I know and how big the universe is. Because I’ve learned to love truth and wish to know everything about it and from every angle.

Some of the best insights in biodynamics are from people I know who developed a preparation one step further than its original form. And that’s what life is: taking another step. It doesn’t mean a total overhaul, but to advance and expound on additional considerations that are not given in Steiner’s original aphoristic indications.

Getting nettles safely through an entire year can be a difficult task in warm areas, such as my subtropical farm. We have a lot of worms, as any good biodynamic farm should, but whatever is put in our sandy loam soil tends to transform quite dramatically and sometimes perhaps a bit too quickly. This year, I selected unglazed terracotta pots. There are several reasons for doing this, but one thought is that the porous pots will allow excess moisture to leave the buried nettles, and the pottery itself will become inoculated — as in bokashi — with indigenous microorganisms (IMOs). As soon as I am ready to dig these preparations up in 2026, I will have harvested and dried another round, ready to refill the exact same vessels. This continuously used vessel allows each year to meet briefly and pass the torch to the future.

Making Stinging Nettle Preparation

Some punk making stinging nettle preparation on his birthday, Autumn 2015

Somewhat less smug, making nettle preparation Autumn 2022

Historically, I have often used a scythe to cut down stinging nettles, but I’ve found this doesn’t work consistently. So much debris can get caught up in it that you easily spend more time sifting through the materials than you would have just harvesting the best growth tips by hand. Another complicating factor is how gently anchored in the soil nettles can be. The slightest bit of extra pressure and — pop! — you’ve uprooted a plant. This is bad because if you include even a tiny bit of a root in your preparation, these tenacious roots will gobble up your nettles faster than any earthworm. In Steiner’s own words, “not the root”!⁶

Do NOT include the roots of stinging nettle in your preparation!

By the end of a full year, there may not be much remaining. Even during the initial harvest, eight full bushels (~74 gallons) of fresh nettles quickly shrank down to less than 10 gallons of half-dried nettles. I even had to pick some extra fresh nettles to top off the pots I buried. I chop up the nettles roughly before packing them in their containers which helps accelerate their transformation in my experience. These are clearly new pots because we’ve graduated away from the small clay flue tiles simply because I just need more on hand. In an ideal world, I would add finished nettle preparation from last year each time to the mix. I’ve since harvested another eight bushels to dry, pack, and bury.

All those little spines on nettles? Those are trichomes, which also grow on tomatoes and cannabis. As such, nettles is an ideal plant for either. One year, I ran out of compost for our tomatoes. But I had an enormous amount of composted nettles. We took out entire handfuls to bury under each tomato plant — and I’ve never seen such beautiful glistening trichomes on tomatoes! And this, too, on a very poor bed that was only newly added as a garden bed. The only compost the tomatoes got was from stinging nettles, and they did splendidly. This is not telling you to buy stinging nettles as a preparation.

This is a call to action: go forth and do likewise! Stinging nettle can be found in abundance on the edges: forest woodlands, ponds, and any shady spot that gathers moisture. On my farm it grows like a weed in our pasture, around the trees in our orchard and even along the side of our house: a generous gift from nature to be used again and again. As abundant as the nettle is, so too may be our compost piles and preparations.

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If you’d like to get some hands-on practical experience making the nettle preparation on a working biodynamic farm, please consider joining us this spring (June 13-15th) for our annual spring preparation making biodynamic workshop, which will be hosted at my farm, Perennial Roots Farm in Accomac, Virginia. Over the course of three days, we will be making the yarrow, chamomile, dandelion, and stinging nettle preparations, and if there’s time, we might even get around to making the silica preparation as well. Food will be provided by

Natalie McGill

with vegetables and meat grown lovingly here on our biodynamic farm with vegan and vegetarian options available. June is one of the loveliest times when the garden is abundantly productive and (hopefully) the weeds haven’t gotten away from us yet! A farm tour to see the inner workings of an integrated biodynamic animal and vegetable operation will also be provided. Michael Judge will be visiting to present about how natural sciences and the unfolding of human consciousness relate to biodynamics. Take a look at how our workshop went last fall. I hope many of you will be able to join us. See you there!

1. T.S. Eliot

2. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VI (14 June, 1924 Koberwitz)

3. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture V (13 June, 1924 Koberwitz)

4. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture V (13 June, 1924 Koberwitz)

5. In Orthodox theology, one can know God through his “energies” but never in his “essence.” This sounds complicated, but it’s simple. You know a good tree by its fruits. You can’t get “inside” the tree itself, but you can see what it does (its energetic activities, or its bio-dynamics you could even say). We cannot see the wind but we see its effects. Likewise, each person in front of you has a hidden world of thoughts, feelings, and wishes that is inaccessible to others. But we know what others value most by how they act and how they treat others. Our actions are fruits born from our souls into the physical world which grow out of an invisible spiritual source. This is what is meant when it is said “faith without works is dead” — there is no such thing as a good tree that does not bear good fruit. There is no such thing as a good person that does not live an upright life even though external upright behavior is not the source of his righteousness. External upright behavior is the fruit of a deep inner life. We all act with conceptual fidelty to what we value and our actions are the fruit of that faith.

6. R. Steiner, Agriculture Course, Lecture VI (14 June, 1924 Koberwitz)